A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin
shocked newspaper readers throughout the Atlantic world.
In France, the news of Ogé’s execution and Mauduit’s murder galvanized both supporters of racial equality and defenders of slavery. Brissot and the Friends of the Blacks denounced the harsh punishment inflicted on Ogé, a man who, they claimed, had all the qualifications needed to be a French citizen. Members of the slaveowners’ lobby responded by pushing to make sure that their racial privileges were protected by French law. In mid-May 1791, the National Assembly held its longest and most heated debate about these issues. The colonial deputy Moreau de Saint-Méry challenged his opponents head on by moving that the new French constitution explicitly guarantee that no changes would be made in the institution of slavery without the consent of the white colonists. An outraged Maximilien Robespierre, one of the leaders of Assembly’s radical Jacobin faction, replied that it would be better “to let the colonies perish rather than violate a principle” by mentioning the word “slavery” in the constitution of a free country. The best Robespierre and his allies could obtain, however, was an agreement to replace the word “slaves” with the phrase “unfree persons.”
Unhappy at having allowed themselves to be pressured into recognizing the legality of slavery, a majority of the deputies voted for an amendment to this law proposed by the deputy Jean-François Rewbell that granted full political rights to free men of color whose parents had also been free. This “Rewbell amendment” would have benefited only a minority of the free people of color, but it did for the first time directly challenge the notion that only racially pure whites could be full citizens in the colonies. The significance of the law was clear to observers in the United States, where newspapers closely followed the French debate because of its implications for race relations throughout the Americas. Moreau de Saint-Méry and his supporters were infuriated by the amendment’s passage. For two years, they had fought to establish the principle that only the colonists themselves could decide questions about what they called “the status of persons” in the colonies. By voting for the Rewbell amendment, limited as it was, the National Assembly had asserted the metropolitan government’s power to make such decisions; the white colonists feared that the next step would be a law limiting the powers of slaveowners. Their fears were heightened by the assembly’s vote to send a three-member Civil Commission to Saint-Domingue to oversee the implementation of the law. Although the members of this First Civil Commission were supposed to rely on persuasion to get the whites to accept the new decree, their appointment represented an effort by the French legislature to rein in the white colonists’ dangerous tendency to act as though they were entitled to govern themselves.
When news of the law of 15 May 1791 reached Saint-Domingue at the end of June, virtually the entire white population rose in revolt. General Philibert Blanchelande, the new governor who had arrived in the island in November 1790, had to tell the French government that he would not be able to enforce the law if it was officially transmitted to him. The colonists’ lobby launched a determined campaign to overturn the decree; on 24 September 1791, shortly before it dissolved, the National Assembly reversed itself and voted to leave the fate of the rights of free colored persons entirely in the hands of the white colonists. Meanwhile, however, the members of the First Civil Commission had already sailed for Saint-Domingue; they would arrive only to learn that one of the main purposes of their mission had been cancelled, thereby adding to the confusion in the colony. Because it took two months for news to cross the Atlantic, the assembly handed the white colonists this victory before anyone in France knew of the event that was to totally transform the situation in Saint-Domingue: on 22 August 1791, a massive slave insurrection had begun in the North Province.
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